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Daniel Fuchs blogs on Scene Builder, JMX, SNMP, Java, etc...

Java, Ten Years After.

No, I am not going to blog about any hypothetical live performance of the famous
blues-band
in a well known indonesian island. This has rather to do with the first Java program I wrote (an Applet) 10 years ago.

When I left Austria where I spent five years working for Alcatel, in Vienna,
I was hired by a small french company - Netmansys, located in
Grenoble, France.

There I had the opportunity to follow one of the first Java courses organized by
Sun for its own employees. After completing that course I wrote a
small Java Applet which would let you explore the
fractal images of Mandelbrot.
I believe this was back in 1996 - or maybe 1997 - nearly ten years ago.
As far as I remember I must have used JDK 1.0.1 or something like that. The class
file bears the version "45" and can be loaded with JDK 1.0.2
appletviewer (yes, we do have archives of old binaries at Sun ;-)).

The point is, I compiled this code on an HP-UX workstation, using one of the
earliest JDK versions, ten years ago. When I left Netmansys, I copied this binary
code to my private web-page. What doesn't fail to amaze me, is that this small
binary, compiled nearly 10 years ago, on an HP-UX workstation, with
JDK ~ 1.0.2 or such, still runs now, using Java RE 5.0, both on my
Solaris 10 Ultra Sparc and my 1.9 Ghz AMD PC XP!!!?
Why, I even had it run with the not yet released
Java SE 6.0 Mustang!
And you know what? Since the performances of the JDK have improved constantly,
it even runs better and faster now than before!
And it's the same old binary, and as
far as I remember, I didn't even recompile it once!